


[Player] is Suffering From Thirst. [Player] is Well Again.

by counterheist



Series: Yuuri Week 2017 [6]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Oregon Trail, Blink and you'll miss it, Day 6, Humor, I accidentally gave Yuuri an Impregnation Kink, Implied Chris/Phichit/Georgi, M/M, Mutual Pining, Theme: Home, Theme: Love, Thirsty Victor Nikiforov, Viktor Nikiforov's Foot Thing, Wingman Christophe Giacometti, Wingman Phichit Chulanont, Yuuri Week 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 10:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11644977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: “Tell him you're a blacksmith, Yuuri, tell him you're good with your hands.”“…but I'm not a blacksmith?” Phichit is a blacksmith. Yuuri used to make saddles and gaze longingly at daguerreotypes of men wearing the newest shirt collar designs. Now he gazes longingly at Russian immigrants. Maybe he’ll see Nikiforov wearing a new shirt at the next Fort. Maybe he’ll drown at a river crossing first.Who’s to say?





	[Player] is Suffering From Thirst. [Player] is Well Again.

**Author's Note:**

> The historical accuracy of this piece of derivative literature is directly proportional to the amount I have slept in the last couple of days.

Georgi may have almost died of dysentery twice, but there's only one more river left to ford until they reach the Willamette Valley. Even still, Yuri keeps saying they could stop now and already be better off than they were before, back when Georgi had the strength to compose poetry to Anya as he walked next to the wagon. Yuri is a very precocious boy.

“That’s out of the question,” Viktor hums with a wholly undeserved pluck and verve for a man currently stitching together a gunshot wound. “Yakov promised we would see this through until the bitter, remorseful, lonely end. Until I reached my twilight years, hair a distant memory due to my lack of restraint and my own thoughtless students, empty nights steeped in my many regrets.”

“He only says that because he likes you,” Georgi grumbles from his cot on the other side of the banked campfire. He’s still recovering from bout number two and has thusly been commanded to bed rest by a solemn and recently-divorced Yakov.

Yakov’s ex-wife Lilia still travels with their wagon. This is a point of contention, but not for Viktor, who prefers to ignore unpleasant circumstances in favor of waxing magnificently on the curative properties and physical benefits of _life_ and _love_.

 _Life-and-love_ ’s name is Yuuri Katsuki, and his wagon has been trailing theirs since Fort Kearney.

“My grandfather did not send me to this country so you could kill me in your quest to be sodomized, Viktor Vasilievich,” Yuri spits. He has been complaining about dealing with this nonsense for the last thousand miles. He says he refuses to put up with it for a moment longer. He gets very flustered whenever anyone else in the wagon points out he spends even more time talking about Yuuri Katsuki than Viktor does. “We will not ford this river. We have forded too many rivers!”

“If my Yuuri is headed to Oregon City then so are we,” Viktor says, snipping the end off his thread and dropping the bloody needle into a cup of boiling water. He pats his patient heartily on the leg - this time not the one where she was shot - and advises her to perhaps not go hunting with her wife immediately after an argument again. Then he cheerfully asks her for a payment of fifteen bullets and pretends not to speak any English when she attempts to haggle him down.

* * *

Twenty miles past Chimney Rock, the wagon train settles in for the night. Yuuri helps his parents and sister remove the yoke from their oxen before returning to the wagon he shares with his best friend. By the time he gets there they already have company in the form of a tall blond foreigner originally from Lausanne, who introduced himself two hundred and seventy miles earlier at Fort Kearney by asking if Yuuri and Phichit were sexually available, either individually or as a pair, and then needling the general store owner into giving all three of them a better price on wagon tongues. His name is Christophe Giacometti, and he was a banker back in Switzerland. Yuuri assumes Giacometti honed his propositioning skills in Europe, rather than in Saint Louis, where he had been previously living before joining with a group of Italians headed to the Whitman Mission. Yuuri has, as of yet, been too afraid to ask.

Phichit has asked.

Phichit has also promised to stop bringing it up late at night when Yuuri is trying to sleep.

“I hear you have a lot of meat on your hands,” Giacometti says, eyes hooded impractically for the time of day. “Also a dead bison. Care to share?”

Yuuri looks to Phichit. Right, yes, they did manage to carry part of a bison back to camp earlier in the afternoon. A hundred pounds each, with the rest shared between Yuuri’s family and Phichit’s various friends around camp. Phichit has a lot of friends around the camp. Yuuri has one friend around the camp – Phichit – and a painful case on one of the only two doctors within a hundred miles.

Doctor Viktor Nikiforov is originally from Russia. He travels with a tight-knit group of other Russian immigrants in a wagon that has yet to park itself closer than four wagons away from Yuuri’s in the circle at night. He has very long, thin fingers, which are very good at sewing up grazes and setting bones, not that Yuuri has spent hours watching him work while Phichit went off to hunt.

Being a terrible shot has its advantages.

Certainly it has its disadvantages as well, as when the wagon train stopped near a river outside Fort Kearney and everyone had a good time soaking off the travel dust. Doctor Nikiforov had an even better time stripping down and frolicking in the water like a child, or Botticelli’s Venus, one of those, Yuuri will never truly know. That afternoon Yuuri was tasked with fetching water. Rounding a curve in the riverbend, carrying his bucket, all it took was a rough glimpse of Viktor’s _buttonhole worker_ directly and, with a distinct lack of grace, Yuuri fell face-first into the rushes. Luckily he didn’t destroy his spectacles. Unfortunately, they still fell off and Yuuri missed the rest of the good doctor’s enjoyment of the cool waters.

Back in the present, Giacometti leans close enough that Yuuri could count the hairs on his chin if he felt like it. “Now would you say you two dip wicks, or is your friendship open for negotiation?”

Yuuri feels blindsided, as he has come realize is the way people frequently feel around Giacometti. Before he can respond, however, Phichit intervenes. “It depends on who you’re asking for, and which of us you’re asking,” he says.

Giacometti tilts his head significantly towards a spot four wagons away, where Doctor Nikiforov sits with his mentor, Doctor Feltsman. Both of them are staring. Giacometti doesn’t take his eyes off Phichit. Yuuri finds a spot in the dirt fascinating for the rest of the evening.

* * *

By the time they’re approaching Fort Laramie, Chris tells Viktor he’s run out of smooth and dignified ways to suss out Katsuki’s marital status and/or willingness to live codependently with a Russian doctor until the life fades naturally from him. Viktor, he says, will have to start doing his sussing himself.

“Tell him there's a cholera outbreak going around the camp and you must immediately give him a physical,” Chris suggests.

“I want _him_ to give _me_ a physical,” Viktor sighs. “With his hands. With his _thighs._ ”

“Anya had thighs. _Has_ ,” Georgi also sighs on his way past them towards the river. He’s holding a bucket full of clothes and wearing the determined grimace of a man who tried to get a teenager to do his laundry, but failed to such an extent that he is now burdened with scrubbing that teenager’s pungent, paste-stained drawers.

“So do I,” Chris calls out to Georgi’s retreating back, both hands cupped around his mouth.

He whistles too.

Viktor finishes administering a dose of laudanum to a man chewing vigorously on a leather strap, attempting not to scream at the pain from his foot, recently crushed underneath a wagon wheel. “There, there,” Viktor says. “Do _you_ think Katsuki would court me? It’s not like I _haven’t_ been direct with him, you know.”

The man whimpers, which Viktor takes to mean he agrees and would also like more laudanum.

“It’s just,” he says, handing the man a bit of vodka for good measure, “he keeps avoiding me whenever I try to meet him where he is.”

“M-maybe give him space to decide,” the man coughs out after Viktor has determined him sufficiently treated.

“No one asked you, Smith,” Viktor says. The man’s name is not Smith. Viktor calls every American he doesn’t bother with knowing ‘Smith’. He pretends to not remember any English when Smith requests more laudanum later on in the day.

* * *

Yuuri grows up on the outskirts of Detroit, where his parents run an inn. He learns sums from his father and cooking from his mother, though his older sister Mari is always tacitly acknowledged as the one who will eventually inherit the business. What Yuuri ends up having a knack for is horsemanship. He spends long days between the inn’s stable and the fields behind it, even apprentices to a local saddlemaker and leatherworker. When his work becomes somewhat popular in the area and his parents hear of the opportunities to the west, they decide as a family to take their chances on the Oregon Trail.

One of the inn’s permanent boarders and Yuuri’s best friend, good-natured orphan Phichit Chulanont, elects to go with them.

This, Yuuri first believes, is a very good thing. He doesn’t deal well with new people; Phichit does.

This, Yuuri reassess after several months following behind the Feltsman wagon, is a terrible thing.

“Tell him you're a blacksmith, Yuuri, tell him you're good with your hands.”

“…but I'm not a blacksmith?” Phichit is a blacksmith. Yuuri used to make saddles and gaze longingly at daguerreotypes of men wearing the newest shirt collar designs. Now he gazes longingly at Russian immigrants. Maybe he’ll see Nikiforov wearing a new shirt at the next Fort. Maybe he’ll drown at a river crossing first.

Who’s to say?

“If you don’t tell him _something_ he’ll lose interest eventually,” Phichit says. It’s his turn to lead the oxen as Yuuri jogs next to the wagon. He is abusing Yuuri’s need to breathe instead of speak, and Yuuri will not forget it the next time Phichit wants Yuuri to cook for him.

“What interest,” he mumbles between breaths.

“Oh, no, you’re right,” Phichit backtracks, and, wait. Is this a trick? “He’ll lose the head-over-heels case he’s got going for you. His heart and his _bag of tricks_ will both droop in despair, and he’ll have to resuscitate himself. If he doesn’t make it we’ll have a very touching funeral for him. ‘Another one falls to the Devious Fatale who Ensnares Men, Yuuri Katsuki’ his headstone will read. It will take us _hours_ to carve.”

“Don’t sell me a dog, Chulanont,” Yuuri grumbles. He starts jogging a bit faster to move up next to his parents’ wagon. If Phichit is going to be like that then he’ll catch up with Mari, who has always loved him and supported him, and never insults what Yuuri feels for people who have no reason to feel the same way back.

“You ever gonna put in with that doctor?” is the first thing she says when Yuuri gets within speaking distance. “He treated mom’s toothache for free yesterday. When she called him Vicchan he just about died.”

* * *

The further they progress, the more interactions Yuuri and Nikiforov have. At first these are significantly painful for Yuuri, who stands stonefaced while Nikiforov pleasantly discusses the trail, or the weather, or Russia, or horses. But the more Yuuri gets to know him the more relaxed he begins to feel around him.

Still, sometimes Viktor Nikiforov doesn’t make any sense at all.

“His English isn't very good,” Yuuri says, several days out of Soda Springs. Phichit is sitting next to him on the wagon for once. It rained the night before, and the trail has been a muddy mess for miles. “He asked to sit on my face yesterday.”

Phichit draws a hand down his face as if it could wipe his disappointment away. “...and you told him he meant to say saddle.”

Yuuri’s grip on the reins tightens. “What else could he have meant? If he sat on my face I would die, Phichit. Viktor doesn't want to murder me. He's a pacifist.”

* * *

“Buy him a new pair of boots if you’re so concerned about his feet,” Georgi groans. “And then stop talking about his feet. I cannot compose a sonnet while ill.”

Yuri sits next to Lilia on the back of the wagon and recites his sums that much louder, as if long division could ever actually deter Georgi’s compositions or Viktor’s preoccupations with Yuuri Katsuki’s toes.

The patient Viktor is currently handing a jar of pickles readily agrees that Katsuki’s toes are delightful. Viktor calls her ‘Smith’ and asks for two pounds of flour in payment for treating her scurvy.

* * *

“Manifest your destiny!” Phichit holds his arms out wide, as if to encompass all of Oregon territory, or at least the Columbia Gorge, in his impassioned plea for Yuuri to do something about his crush on Doctor Viktor Nikiforov other than to pine relentlessly. “Move in on him and plow his fields.”

And, wonderful, now Yuuri’s thinking about doing just that. It’s not proper to think about farming in public in the middle of the day on a Sunday. Greater men have been punished for lesser offences. Yuuri can feel his face burn worse than the back of Viktor’s neck in the sun. “Phichit, stop.”

“Claim his wide open pastures,” Phichit leers.

“Phichit, he’s right over there.”

“Grow crops in his fertile soil,” Phichit winks.

“That's not even possible,” Yuuri quickly admonishes with a speed that suggests he is completely disgusted and disappointed in Phichit for even mentioning it.

Because Phichit both knows him and was his roommate back at the inn outside Detroit, and is his current roommate now in their wagon, he is perfectly aware of exactly how Yuuri feels about growing his crops in Viktor’s fertile soil. Yuuri wishes he didn’t know. _Phichit_ wishes he didn’t know. Phichit pretends not to notice that some of the daguerreotypes Yuuri hung up inside their wagon at the beginning of the trip have now gone suspiciously missing.

If this gives Phichit a reason to spend more time out by the river, washing out their linens, well, he’ll take it. Yuuri isn’t the only one with a Russian suitor.

“I can pretend, if that’s what you like,” Viktor calls out from the back of Doctor Feltsman’s wagon. For once he’s not seeing a patient, just sitting and waving at Yuuri like they’ve come across each other on a walk through Grand Circus Park.

Yuuri waves tentatively back.

* * *

Bedraggled but whole, the wagon train pulls up to Oregon City near the end of September. They quickly disperse to their different destinations. Some, like the Crispinos, already departed from the rest of the group further up the Columbia River. Christophe parted ways with them to stay with his newfound friend, Viktor, and newfound _friends_ , Georgi and Phichit, for a bit longer.

“They don’t need me at the Mission,” Christophe tells Yuuri one evening after a full day of scouting with Mari for the best location for a new Yu-Topia Inn. “And I’m having quite a bit of fun here.”

“You’ll have to have your fun somewhere else tonight, Chris,” Viktor interjects, walking up from where he’d been diagnosing a patient with ‘a very bad snakebite, yes, you really shouldn’t have stepped on that snake.’ He sits down next to Yuuri and draws his arm around Yuuri’s shoulders.

He spent the day scouting the best location to set up his new practice. Logically, he had mused the night before, the practice should be somewhere close to a stable so he could ride out at night if he was urgently needed. That made sense to Yuuri. And, he had continued, rolling over and propping his head up on his hand, it would be best to situate it near a place with hearty, home-cooked meals, as neither Viktor nor Yakov could cook particularly well and both of them were too afraid to ask Lilia to do it. That made less sense to Yuuri, who enjoyed the pickle stew Viktor had made for him on the Trail.

When he said so, Viktor smiled fondly and bent down to give him a kiss.

When Viktor mentions the perfect spot he found is right next to the perfect spot Yuuri and Mari found, Yuuri looks up at him and can’t hold back the smile on his face.

On the other side of the fire, Georgi drags away a gagging Yuri Plisetsky.

On their side of the fire, Yuuri and Viktor sit shoulder to hip and quietly make plans for their new home together.

**Author's Note:**

> I looked up way more stuff than I expected to for a fic premised on complete nonsense. A lot of these things were idioms. My favorite was probably _don’t sell me a dog_ = don’t lie to me. It seemed like a very Yuuri and/or Viktor thing to say with affront.
> 
> Italicized phrases are probably euphemisms for penises. I found a fantastic [Timeline of Penis Slang](http://timeglider.com/timeline/194b572e19fd461b) and it made writing this on Hawaii Time so much better.
> 
> By the way, this doubles as the story of how Hasetsu, Oregon is founded.


End file.
